The Government's AI Safety Institute is set to open a new office in San Francisco to bridge the gap with Silicon Valley's tech giants.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) announced that the office is scheduled to open this summer, aiming to collaborate closely with the major AI labs located in the area. First revealed at last year's AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, the UK's AI Safety Institute, along with its global counterparts, is dedicated to researching and evaluating AI models to shape effective safety policies.
The institute recently shared initial results from safety assessments of five publicly accessible advanced AI models, keeping the specifics of the results anonymous. According to the findings, while some models demonstrated capabilities akin to PhD-level knowledge in chemistry and biology and succeeded in cyber security tasks, they faltered with more complex challenges.
The report highlighted that all tested models are still prone to basic "jailbreaks" that bypass safety measures, and some can generate dangerous outputs even without deliberate manipulation. Moreover, the tests underscored that these AI models could not handle intricate, time-intensive tasks without human intervention.
The UK is gearing up for the AI Seoul Summit, co-hosted with South Korea, featuring key appearances by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan alongside global tech leaders. Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan highlighted the growth of the AI Safety Institute, saying: "This expansion represents British leadership in AI in action."
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She added:: "It is a pivotal moment in the UK's ability to study both the risks and potential of AI from a global lens, strengthening our partnership with the US and paving the way for other countries to tap into our expertise as we continue to lead the world on AI safety."
"Since the Prime Minister and I founded the AI Safety Institute, it has grown from strength to strength and in just over a year, here in London, we have built the world's leading Government AI research team, attracting top talent from the UK and beyond. Opening our doors overseas and building on our alliance with the US is central to my plan to set new, international standards on AI safety which we will discuss at the Seoul Summit this week."
Ian Hogarth, chairman of the AI Safety Institute (AISI), said "The results of these tests mark the first time we've been able to share some details of our model evaluation work with the public. Our evaluations will help to contribute to an empirical assessment of model capabilities and the lack of robustness when it comes to existing safeguards."
"AI safety is still a very young and emerging field. These results represent only a small portion of the evaluation approach AISI is developing. Our ambition is to continue pushing the frontier of this field by developing state-of-the-art evaluations, with an emphasis on national security-related risks."
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